Video: “Is an Emancipatory Communism Possible?”

“Is an Emancipatory Communism Possible?”
A talk by Allan Armstrong
Recorded Wednesday, April 13 at 7:00 PM at TRS, Inc. in NYC

Mention of the word “Communism” today conjures up visions of tyrants. Young people, even when they clash violently with the representatives of global capitalism in Seattle or London, call their protests “anti-capitalist,” not communist. However, anti-capitalism is not enough. Revolutions can lead to immediate feelings of intense liberation, but they are usually followed by much longer periods of defense, setbacks, and painful reconstruction. The 20th century was the “Century of Revolutions,” but it eventually produced so little for humanity at such a high cost, that it is not surprising that many are very cautious, despite growing barbarism. Read More

Adventures in the New Economy: The New Home-Work

by Tiffany Goldman

In the “New Economy,” many of the available and newly created jobs require that the employees “work remotely.” The employee is expected to furnish the work environment…be it at the local Starbucks––with blaring music and deafening coffee grinding––or in the social seclusion of one’s home. Typically, the employee provides computer equipment, Internet connection, Smartphone with unlimited calls, e-mailing and texting, general office supplies (e.g., high-priced cartridges), and business transportation, subject to escalating fuel costs. Read More

Value and Crisis: Bichler & Nitzan versus Marx

By Andrew Kliman, author of Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital”: A refutation of the myth of inconsistency

This article responds to recent works by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, influential radical political-economic thinkers who teach, respectively, at York University in Toronto and at colleges in Israel. Part I, below, responds to Bichler and Nitzan’s (B&N)  “Systemic Fear, Modern Finance and the Future of Capitalism” (Bichler and Nitzan 2010). In this paper, they argue that (1) “systemic fear”–fear of the death of the capitalism–has gripped capitalists during the last decade, but (2) capitalists’ belief that their system is eternal is necessary for its continued existence. So (3) the alleged systemic fear is itself a threat to the system. And thus we have yet another version of the notion that capital itself may be the historical Subject that will bring it down.

B&N claim that fear of the death of the system’s death has gripped capitalists only during two periods in recent history–the Great Depression and the 2000s. Their evidence for this claim consists entirely of the alleged fact that these two periods of crisis were the only periods since World War I in which equity (stock) prices and current profits were strongly correlated, i.e. the only periods in which they closely moved up and down together.[1] However, using the exact same methods and the exact same data as B&N, I show below that that equity prices and current profits were also strongly correlated from the early 1950s through 1973–during the so-called golden age of capitalism!

In Parts II and III of this article, which will appear here later this month, I will respond to the critique of Marx’s value theory that pervades Nitzan and Bichler’s 2009 book, Capital as Power. In this book, they allege that Marx’s value theory is practically useless for the study of accumulation. So my response will show, among other things, that his theory sheds significant light on the long decline in the rate of accumulation (investment) that contributed to ever-increasing debt burdens in the U.S. and helped set the stage for the recent Great Recession. Read More

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